"Here, take this," he said, pouring Jude a stiff drink.
He took one himself.
Jude told the whole story again. He said it was strange, how natural Raymond looked on the bench, what a shock it was when his body fell forward.
"The thing is, I should have trusted him. I doubted him — I admit it."
"You think it was an Orderly who killed him?"
"No. I think it was the first guy I saw. He took the file. The Orderly was probably following me."
Jude took a healthy swig.
"And that's another thing — tell me why the Orderly looked so old all of a sudden, when he was lying there dead. I got a glimpse of him on the subway — or at least one of them — and I promise you, that one was years younger. Somehow it all fits in with those kids on the island — but damned if I know how."
"Tizzie knows — or thinks she does," said Skyler.
Jude was taken aback. Emotions flooded through him.
"You've seen her? How is she? Is she all right?"
"Yeah, she looks okay — tired, though. The important thing is, she's found out some stuff. She wants us to meet at her office tomorrow. To go over everything."
"Her office — at Rockefeller? I don't know, is that safe?"
"She says the place will be quiet. We just have to be careful how we get there, make sure we're not followed."
"Okay. Tizzie! Christ, it'll be good to see her." He looked at Skyler. "You were gone a long time. Were you with her the whole time?"
"Yes. I, uh, I had a little relapse."
"What? What happened? Skyler, are you okay?"
"No, no, I'm fine. It wasn't much. In fact, the timing was good, as it turned out. Tizzie made some calls, and arranged for me to get some more blood. They put that medicine in it — what's it called? — urokinase."
"Did you have to give your name to get the blood?"
"No. We went to some clinic in Brooklyn. The doctor called himself an alternative medicine practitioner. He said he was willing to bend the rules 'for the sake of my health.' He also wanted to be paid in cash — in advance."
"But you're okay now? You certainly look better."
"Best I've felt in days."
"Good." Jude lay down on the bed.
"Christ. What a day."
Jude closed his eyes to go to sleep, and Skyler stayed up for a while, watching over him.
Jude and Skyler traveled separately to Tizzie's office, and arrived within five minutes of each other. Tizzie didn't have any trouble signing them in; because of her twins research, the guards were accustomed to look-alike visitors.
She unlocked her office.
"I believe this is the time to put everything on the table," she said. "Everything we know. We can analyze it, think about it and then hopefully come up with some idea of what to do to get out of this mess alive."
She fixed them coffee. As Jude sat in a chair, looking at the African sculptures, he couldn't help but think back to the first time he had met her. The memory carried a small ache, like an echo of a happier time, which didn't surprise him. So much had happened since then, so much had changed, things that he never would have believed.
He felt like laughing to himself. But they were reaclass="underline" just look how his life had been turned upside-down. Back then he had been worried about intangibles like career and relationships. Now he was worried about being knifed in the street.
He looked at Skyler. Again, he was struck by the thought of how much he had grown, how much older and in command he seemed.
Skyler and Tizzie sat side by side on the couch. They looked natural together. To Jude, it suddenly seemed obvious that they had reached a new intimacy. He wondered if they had slept together. He wondered, too, if he was fighting back jealousy — he thought of probing his emotions to find out, like jabbing a tooth with a tongue to check for a cavity. The problem with looking for emotions was you had to know what to do with them once you found them.
But the new situation, whatever it was, did seem to make for a certain awkwardness. It struck him that both of them appeared overly solicitous of him — she poured him coffee and he brought it to him. And Jude kept noticing little things he didn't particularly want to — like how they seemed to lean toward each other ever so slightly when they talked on the couch.
He caught himself. I've been a little off ever since Raymond, he thought. Next I'll be looking for her handkerchief in his pocket.
Tizzie took charge. She moved over and sat behind her desk and asked Jude to tell her everything from start to finish — the trip to the island, meeting Raymond on the railroad tracks, finding his body in Central Park. He recounted it all, including fleeing from the Orderly and seeing him dead as an old man on the street. Then she told them about her reports to Uncle Henry and her time in the SUNY lab and her ferry ride with Alfred.
"Let me ask you something," said Skyler. "What did he look like?"
She made a face. "Repulsive-looking."
"Beak nose — right? Flaming red hair?"
She was astonished. "How did you know?"
He laughed out loud. "I knew his other half — on the island. A Gemini named Tyrone. He was just as bad — he was a snitch, too."
"Christ," said Jude. "We ought to check all these people out with you. You grew up with them, so you know what they're going to do before they do it."
It occurred to him that the remark applied to Tizzie, too.
After coffee Tizzie turned serious, got up and walked around and then sat down opposite Skyler.
"Yesterday, when I asked you about inoculations on the island, you said you didn't always know what they were for. I want you to explain that."
Skyler leaned back, cleared his throat.
"Well, there were the regular weekly injections. Everyone got them — vitamins, I think. At least, that's what we were told. Sometimes gamma globulin, things to keep you generally healthy. Plus all kinds of vaccinations against disease.
"But at one point — this goes back some years, a long time ago — a group of us were given some kind of special treatment. We got injections once a week. It lasted quite a while. Maybe a couple of months — I don't know exactly. I remember the experience, though, vividly, because we got excused from regular activities. But I hated the needles — they were large. And there were a lot of follow-up exams, probing and prodding, that kind of thing."
"How many got this special treatment?"
"I think there were six of us. The group included Raisin and" — Skyler looked down uncomfortably—"Julia. Me and three others."
Jude looked at Tizzie. "What are you getting at?" he asked.
But she didn't answer directly.
"I want to show you something."
Her voice was grave.
She led them out of her office and down the hall, where she unlocked a door. Inside was a laboratory, banks of workstations with thick Formica tops, computers and thin hoses for gas and water. The overhead lights were already on — she had been there only minutes before they arrived.
She led them to a corner, where a microscope was set up. Next to it was a tray of slides. She slipped one in and turned on the power, looked through the eyepiece, turned some knobs and made other adjustments. Then she stepped back and let them look.
It took a while to find the focus point through the long cylinder, but soon they saw it clearly enough — a blob of jelly-like substance contained in a near-perfect circle. A single human cell. She then showed them three more slides, highly magnified so that it was difficult at first to figure out what they were looking at. She provided a narrative.
"The first one shows the chromosomes of a normal average-age cell. Look at the tips. Those little squiggles you see there are telomeres, which shorten each time the cell divides. The next one is an old cell. It has divided the requisite fifty times and is approaching senescence. See — the telomeres are practically down to nothing. The last looks much the same. The telomeres are short, the cell is dying. The difference is that, in this one, the aging is premature — it comes from a boy who is, in chronological years, only thirteen. He has a disease that is causing his cells to die."